Ribs Gone Tropical
The Meatwave: Ribs Gone Tropical.
This link isn't so much for sharing it is me bookmarking it so that I can make these at a future date.
Playing With Face Recognition
Picasa has had face recognition since version 3.5. I hadn't ever really paid attention to this feature until the past weekend. It turns out that it's pretty neat, despite having some obvious flaws.
I spent about two hours sorting and organizing digital photographs that we have taken over the past seven-plus years. The backup solution I was using consisted of randomly copying photographs to an external drive with no rhyme or reason, at times I remembered to do so. Now that we have a significant photograph collection (14,214 photos) it was time to automate and actually try a bit harder to make sure things were sufficiently backed up.
To do this, I scoured my entire computer trying to find photographs - they were hidden every-which-place. Backups that have propagated from older machines were just kind of copied into newer machines with no regard for location. I have a smallish root disk, on which Picasa is installed, and I'd run out of space from time to time. This required me to move photos to another drive. I'd name it something that obviously made sense at the time of moving - but when I had to go back and actually locate the moved copies, I wondered aloud what past me was thinking.
Then, when we got the eye-fi card, it picked a whole different place to actually upload photos. So, I had to locate all those too.
In older versions of Windows, you'd have the My Pictures/My Photos folder under your My Documents directory. This "My Pictures" directory would belong to the user that was logged on. In Windows 7, you can set up libraries for different media types by pointing it to already existing directories that hold pictures. So, when I select my photo library, it will show me all photos that I have, provided that all photo directories have been added to the library. So I did that - now I can see all the pictures I have in one location, as opposed to having to randomly browse around to see where the hell everything was.
Picasa has the same thing - it will scan for pictures, but only in locations you tell it to scan. I hadn't messed with any of that - now I have. I now have Picasa scanning our photo library. It took Picasa quite a while to import everything.
This is when I decided to start playing with the facial recognition stuff. When importing, I was trying to figure out why it was taking so dang long. Turns out that while importing, Picasa is scanning each photograph for faces, and putting them into an "Unknown Person" category in their "People" tab, where you can sort photographs by people. It's kind of neat.
So if you go into the "Unknown Person" hopper and start telling Picasa who certain people are, it makes a unique hopper for each person. So if I tag a photo as being Owen - whom we have one or two photos of - it will re-analyze all the found faces and add anything that might be Owen to his hopper. Here comes the crappy part - I have to go through both of the only photos we have of Owen and filter out all the photos that aren't Owen. The filter isn't perfect - yet.
Basically, Picasa thinks that any baby I've ever photographed, or have a photograph of - is Owen. So I have to go pick out Alex, Blase, Taylor, Ryan, etcetera. When I pick those out and tell Picasa - yes, these are Owen, I've made the facial filter a bit smarter, so it scans again. It suggests that a bunch more people are Owen, with a lot less false positives. Soon, it gets just about everything right, regarding Owen.
The cool thing is that when I eventually get around to tagging a picture as being Blase - it kind of already knows Blase, and does a much better job.
At first, I had around 14,000+ photos to classify, but using this adaptive filter, and about an hour of my time, I've whittled it down to 8000 or so photos.
The problems: Picasa can't handle beards very well, so any picture of anyone that has a beard - to Picasa, you're were all the same person. That means when I selected Joe - Picasa thought that Jeremy, Kenny, Craig with beard, terrorist me ... and anybody else, was Joe. To my surprise, Picasa also selected the many pictures of beardless Joe I have in regards to Joe. Beard sorting took some time.
Picasa finds all faces. For instance, if Anna and I took a photograph in front of our fireplace mantle, on which we have photographs of people - Picasa would find our faces, and the faces in the photographs on the mantle. That's no big deal until you apply it to public places, like, say parades or baseball games. Picasa picks out all the faces of the random fans in the stands, the folks in the parade, the folks watching the parade, and just about anything else - even and especially the really blurry ones that are hardly in focus. And if those random people are babies or have beards - or are even babies with beards? Picasa doesn't do well.
The interface for approving/disapproving of the people Picasa suggests as being a particular person is slow and error-prone. I guess in theory if you stay on top of your library, it wouldn't be so bad. But when going through 2000+ photos of Owen, if you miss one or two, the filter stays a little screwed up and continues to think that eight month old Alex is the same person. Then you have to slog through all the photos of Owen and find the culprits you may have missed.
I'm not done yet, but I like that our photographs are organized and backed up now.
Behind the Air Force’s and NASA’s X-37B Space Plane
Behind the Air Force's and NASA's X-37B Space Plane - Popularmechanics.com.
I hope I never get to the point where, when I read about something really amazingly technologically cool like this, instead of wondering in awe at what humans can accomplish and thinking about what it means for our future - instead wonder how much it cost us.
Although I guess I should wait and see if they can land it before going full fanboy!
Eggs
Every year that I can recall that we've dyed Easter eggs, we've used Paas dye.
Today I finally decided to figure out what the heck Paas does every other time of year when they're not selling egg dye, because honestly, I have no idea what the heck else they do, if anything. I've never once seen a Paas product that wasn't Easter egg dye.
The answer is, they don't do anything else.
The end. I was hoping this post and research would be more interesting, but it's about as interesting as the fact that the Paas company makes dye.
Toyota Apparently Has No Interest In Our Money
So we decided on the 2011 Toyota Sienna. Check out this link for an idea of how it is to drive.
We opened up an equity line of credit with our credit union in order to buy the van. This gives us price negotiation flexibility, and the rate was actually lower than the car loan rates we had available to us. Plus, we can write off the interest!
On Wednesday I e-mailed a few dealers in the area to ask a few questions and let them know we were interested, thus opening up the negotiation process. I e-mailed three different internet sales reps at three different dealerships. I have received zero replies. I guess they don't want to make the sale?
How Does Your Garden Grow? Depends on the County.
First, I will admit that Colorado vegetable gardening is probably way easier than most other states'. We don't have a lot of bug, pest, or moisture problems. We've been supremely lucky here in that we can spend a full day planting stuff, then spend minimal time maintaining it, and yet we still get a really good yield. It's very nice.
Sure, we could do a lot more and possibly get better results, but our hands-off approach has worked so far.
The bad thing, of course, is that our growing season is so short. We can't plant until May, and our first freeze occurs in late September or early October. We get three less growing months than most other regions in the country.
Since we've decided - or more correctly, when I overruled Anna's motion to have a fire-pit - to start planting veggies I can say that we've learned an awful lot about food, plants, and farming. I can tell you why cilantro is a pain in the butt, yet so inexpensive to purchase. I can tell you ten different ways a tomato plant can fail. I can tell you that cucumbers grow like weeds, even if you don't water them. If you like tomatoes, there is nothing better than going to a cherry tomato plant that grew naturally from the seed of last year's batch of cherry tomatoes and eating them fresh off the vine. I can tell you that Plants that attract bees guarantee garden success. I can tell you how to make excellent compost, and how having foxes that visit your backyard are very helpful in gardening endeavors.
I can also easily say that during our summer and spring months, we eat much better in that we eat so many fresh fruits and vegetables. It doesn't seem like there's much of a downside to having a vegetable garden, unless you factor in the risk that it could completely fail. It hasn't happened to us yet, but it would definitely be maddening to have a spring's worth of effort yield zero results.
I would fully support any educational program that taught kids how to garden, how plants grow, and where vegetables actually come from - and how much work it can take! It's useful knowledge - probably more useful than a lot of the stuff they teach kids in school these days. The only downside here is that vegetable growing requires patience, which a lot of kids don't have. But those that stick with it - I can imagine a child cradling a tomato all the way home to show mom and dad.
So when I read an article that features a quote like this:
"As you know," she wrote, "food-bearing plants attract pests. Maryland law restricts the use of pesticides on school grounds. Therefore, planting of food bearing plants is prohibited by MCPS."
I laugh. Any chance at learning is ruined by the chance that what... a rat could show up? And then possibly bite someone and then the school district could be sued? Our society is ridiculous.
Birefringence
Whenever I see prism like colors on meat, that meat goes into the trash, even if it passes the smell test. Something about animal flesh turning colors that look the same as a shimmery oil puddle is off-putting.
Our neighbors gave us half of a Honeybaked ham recently. I ate some just about every day until it started looking like me lucky charms. Turns out we could've put it in a casserole or something, and likely survived.
Why I’m Confident We Won’t Die in Our Toyota
UPDATE: I have the feeling that this story will be the first of many. Also, $700k in debt? Holy hell!
Being owners of a Prius, lots of folks ask us if we're afraid that at any minute when we're driving it, we could die. I'm not worried about it. Anna is starting to panic a little bit because every time the news comes on, some Toyota or other has been involved in some kind of incident that the perpetrators of those incidents claim is the infamous "glitch". Nobody knows if it's actually the glitch yet, but most folks just assume these days that once you drive a Toyota, you just may not stop!
Bullcrap. I don't for a minute believe that many of these folks are actually experiencing the glitch - especially this one. It's become a convenient excuse for driving asshattery that we don't normally hear about because it happens so often. It's news and a viable excuse now because - anytime a Toyota is involved - it somehow isn't your fault anymore.
if you drive one of the Toyotas recalled for acceleration problems and don’t bother to comply with the recall, your chances of being involved in a fatal accident over the next two years because of the unfixed problem are a bit worse than one in a million—2.8 in a million, to be more exact. Meanwhile, your chances of being killed in a car accident during the next two years just by virtue of being an American are one in 5,244.
Basically, driving is just as dangerous as it's always been.
It's a bit ridiculous how Toyota is being dragged through the mud, Congressional hearing, etcetera. It's a crappy problem to have, and they should feel some business pain about it, but it's completely overblown by the media.
We're confident enough that it's not a problem that we're actually considering the purchase of another Toyota, possibly soon. So take that!
Brees and Son
I don't know why this never got published. Pushing it through now!
This made me pretty happy when I watched it:
For multiple reasons. One, I have a similarly aged son, and if I ever accomplished anything like that, you're damn right I'd have him there with me and be tearing up. Two, the kid isn't paying the least bit of attention to his dad, and instead to the commotion and confetti.
So it isn't just that I'm boring, or Drew is boring, it's just that, well - everything else is more interesting to babies.
The New Space Race
This is a long article regarding our current space program. I'm very pro-space program.
I think it's important to have a frontier, and to seek it.